The matlab licencing will be their downfall. Its the only licence we have in work that is per seat vs being token (floating) based, due to the cost of a floating license. So instead of having a tool any of our engineers can use, we have it assigned to a few engineers, and the others make do with octave or python. The sensible long term is to standardise on one language, and if it were not for certain toolboxes, that would be python or Julia, most likely. If the matlab licenses we had were floating, mathworks would get the same money, but would be more likely to keep our business, instead of pushing us to look into how best we can replace them.